MacroWorld Hybrid Open Access

The Open Access journal model
has been discussed for over 10 years, but has
reached a crescendo of discussion over the last few years with various declarations in favour of
OA from groups of researchers or their
representatives. Journal price rises over the
last decade mean that most universities can no
longer afford subscriptions to all of the
journals that their academics need. A growing
number of universities maintain funds to pay
publication fees on behalf of faculty who choose
to publish in fee-based OA journals. Evidence
shows that making research material Open Access
increases the number of readers and
significantly increases citations to the article
- in some fields increasing citations by 300%.

Thus hybrid journals can arguably be seen as part of a transitional publishing business model. This includes display of
the accepted article and online supporting
material in electronic form on the internet
before and/or after print publication. However, if you choose to make your paper Open Access, this means that anyone on the web may download it for free. Besides this, the option detailed here caters for authors who
want to ensure that their work is available to
anyone free of charge. MacroWorld's Author Hybrid Open Access Option enables authors to pay a
modest fee to provide Open Access.

Hybrid OA​ - traditional model with "open choice"

A hybrid journal is a journal that publishes Open Access articles together with others articles that require a subscription or payment to access and read. Thus, a hybrid journal is a subscription-based journal where only some articles are Open Access, usually after financial sponsorship by the author. A hybrid model means the basic business model of the journal is the subscription model though publishers offer authors the possibility to pay for Open Access (sometimes called “sponsored Open Access”)The term “Double Dipping” is used because publishers receive money twice: the subsriptions are still paid by the universities and authors pay for Open Access. The sponsorship is in fact a publication fee (known as Article Processing Charge (ACP)) that the author chooses to pay to the publisher in order that the article is published as Open Access (OA). The author pays a fee to a conventional publisher to make a particular article openly accessible when it would otherwise be available only to subscribers. Hybrid journals collect both author fees for individual articles as well subscriber fees.​​

A growing number of publishers are adopting “hybrid models” where the papers are Open Access after a financial sponsorship of the author. This is seen by some publishers as a transition method from subscription-based access to open access. Hybrid Open Access is a new development, increasingly offered by both university presses and well-known commercial publishers.

Hybrid Open Access means that some articles are available only to subscribers, while others are made available at no charge to anyone searching the web. Authors pay an additional fee for the open access option. They may do this because open access is a requirement of their research funding agency. MacroWorld’s hybrid open access charge is USD $300 or EUR €230 per article, a very reasonable price compared to our hybrid open access competitors and purely open access journals that are resourced with an author publication fee.

The Open Access Article Option process

The majority of all MW journals offer a hybrid option, which permits both traditional subscription-based content as well as open access, author-pays content. If you want or need to make the Version of Record of your article available through Open Access immediately upon publication because of funder requirements, this can be arranged through payment of a fee (Article Publication Charge). Authors can now request macroworld to make their articles accepted for publication available online and openly accessible to all without any restriction except use for commercial purposes. This option is also available for previously published articles. Open Access publication
charges can be often included within the costs
of research funding, so the money for access
comes through the research funder, rather than
through the library budget. It is important to
point out that Open Access does not affect
peer-review; articles are peer-reviewed and
published in journals in the normal way. It is a
service for our authors and those funders who
wish to support open access publication.

The costs of
Open Access publishing therefore have to be met
by the author, or by the author's institution or
research funding agency. We therefore seek a
simple publication fee of USD $300 or EUR €230
for each article submitted. This flat charge,
which varies from journal to journal, covers the
entire cost of the publication process. This
includes peer-reviewing, editing, publishing,
maintaining and archiving, and allows immediate
access to the full text versions of the research
articles.

MacroWorld
Open Access are continually on the road meeting
the community, participating in discussions and
establishing partnerships which will help
support increase access to research. If you are
interested in joining MacroWorld Open Access
membership program, or if you have any
questions, please do not hesitate to contact the
MW Copyright Office or MacroWorld Publishing
Support with any questions.